Opinion: The fentanyl response in BC has been an absolute disgrace

Every millennial remembers DARE. Perhaps, like me, you still have the T-shirt. 

For those uninitiated, DARE involved a police officer coming into your school gym, usually with a mascot dancing to some “hip” music, to try to convince you that it’s far cooler to “say no” to drugs. After the assembly, you were handed some DARE swag — the stickers went directly onto stop signs, and the shirts were almost exclusively worn while smoking with friends.

Vintage DARE shirt/Amazon Canada

Unfortunately, DARE became more about the merchandise than it was about the message.

Fast forward 20+ years and, looking back, if things had not played out catastrophically relating to drug abuse, addiction and ultimately overdose deaths in BC, perhaps we would be able to laugh about the DARE campaign.

But nothing about what we are experiencing now in BC is funny. And I fear the frequency of horrific headlines is desensitizing us. 

So much so that I am not sure we all know the facts:

• BC has more deaths per capita from apparent opioid toxicity than any other province in Canada;
• 2023 is on pace to be BC’s deadliest year on record;
• BC leads provinces when it comes to drugs deaths in Canada and adds to the shockingly high number of deaths across North America;
• This is a North America-wide problem, but, as Daphne Bramham put it quite well in a recent column for the Vancouver Sun, we are one of the worst-hit jurisdictions, and have decided to turn our province into a walking test.

Past and projected deaths in North America/The Lancet

Whatever your opinions may be, I think we can all agree that we, as a province, are doing nowhere near enough. While our politicians politicize inaction and/or underfunding and cherry-pick stats or reporting time periods, our friends, family and neighbours are dying.

This is why I think it’s time we bring the conversation back to DARE, or at minimum two things that DARE was good at:

Organizing a response across North America

DARE was universal across North America and invaded popular culture. Similarly, COVID proved that if our government wants to, a central hub — with agreed-upon benchmarks and standardized reporting — is something that they can do. And this current drug crisis more than warrants a unified response from our governments. It was far too difficult to make state-to-provincial comparisons that we made for this column. Because if we in BC think we are not in the same fight as our brothers and sisters in, say, Washington State, we are mistaken.

Raising general awareness & spurring talks with kids

DARE existed for schools. And the fact that I am in the media and I cannot find one single ongoing mass campaign in BC to raise general awareness or talk with our children on this drug crisis and the potential risks that they are potentially putting themselves in, is absolutely crazy. And certainly not reflective of the ongoing mass awareness campaigns south of the border. 

A lot of problems in COVID were amplified by poor communication from our governments, and a lot of us in the media suffered because of that. We need to learn from those early COVID mistakes, and focus on and aggressively invest in awareness and education around this drug crisis — particularly in our schools. 

Although DARE proved that the “drugs are bad” messaging does not add much value, the fact remains that drugs — even “safe” drugs — can kill and the lifespan of drug users is, sadly, usually far shorter than a person not addicted to drugs. And that messaging needs to be balanced with the — also important — destigmatizing of addiction work that is ongoing across the province.

We have been in a public health emergency for fentanyl/drug overdoses for seven years. And, save for the sad monthly death data updates, reminders of this emergency from our government have been woefully few and far between. If I’m being direct — compared to what our government was able and prepared to do for COVID, our fentanyl response in BC has been an absolute disgrace.

We publicly shamed individuals across this province for throwing parties or visiting loved ones during COVID, and yet, at the exact same time, fentanyl dealers were and are nonchalantly released from jail every single day. 

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Now, as a parent with a child in high school here in BC, I am cognizant that alcohol and drugs are as much a part of young life today as they have always been. But I cannot even begin to fathom what some of us have had to endure as a result of this crisis.

COVID redefined what the term “emergency measures” means to British Columbians. We have all now seen how fast our government can move, and the powers they wield, when an issue is dangerous to public health. This drug crisis predates COVID as an emergency and exceeds it in deaths. 

It’s time our government reflects on its learnings from COVID and starts using the tools it mobilized to put up an organized and coordinated response to this fentanyl crisis. The time to “start” conversations is over; it’s time for real and immediate action.